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Sunday, 18 September 2016

The Sweepings of the Wheat: Homily for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday of Year C, Most Precious Blood, Southwark, 18th September 2016

Unless my memory is very much mistaken, when I was a little
boy doing errands for my grandmother, I am sure I noticed the hand of the
greengrocer on the scales as he weighed the potatoes. It all happened so fast –
potatoes rumbling into the pan, an array of weights onto the balance the other
side and – I am sure – the greengrocer’s hand never left the potatoes. Was he
holding them down? Was he making them seem heavier, so we got fewer than we
paid for? It is easy to play tricks on a child, but something was suspect and
you never forget these things.

The prophet Amos (Amos
8.4-7) tells us people were cheating with weights and measures two thousand
eight hundred years ago. He is scathing, too, about those who try to charge for
the sweepings of the wheat. Yet, it never ceases to amaze me how much we are
prepared to pay for dross and junk, for food that is bad for you, for bad
service, mad fashions, services that are no longer good enough, or even there; but
we still pay out.

Then again, the apostle Paul (I Timothy 2.1-8) talks about those who are being saved; and into
our religious imagination piles this idea that Jesus is collecting us like
every little piece of cash and putting us in the bank, saving us up, not allowing
us to be spent up as a wasted resource – either by others’ ill intentions or
our own – so that a tidy sum can be built up, to buy something really
worthwhile. Our Lord has a wry tale (Luke
16.1-13) about a steward who first creams off the top of his employer’s income
to line his own pockets, then reinvents himself as a dodgy benefactor with
someone else’s money. His boss lets him off, but Jesus makes the point that if
you cannot be trusted with other people’s interests, how can God trust you not
to ruin what he has already given you? St Paul’s image of Jesus the only one
who does the saving, recalls Our Lord’s own clear advice: “Store up for
yourselves treasure in heaven – for where you treasure is, there your heart
will be too.”

So we have two human tendencies contrasted – the instinct to
get what we want quick by cheating and exploitation, and the instinct to build
up the resources that we need, by patient preparation and calculation based on
trust. Perhaps St Paul and Jesus, with this talk of saving and accounts, are
thinking of that wonderful story told by Jesus about the man who finds out that
there is a pearl of great price buried somewhere in a field, and so he goes to
the owner with all the money he has, to buy the whole field and be sure of
getting hold of the treasure that lies unseen within it.

Jesus is speaking of course about our spiritual lives and
making clear that (first) the Kingdom of heaven lies buried deep within our
world and deep within our souls; and (secondly) that there are no short cuts to
it. We can only get it to emerge by patiently working the soil, digging our own
hearts, minds and souls over, so that the Holy Spirit can cultivate us, with
the people and society around us, until the beauty of Christ in all His glory and
power flourishes in the lives of those who live justly, compassionately,
generously, truthfully, peacefully from the greatest to the least in all that
we are and all the we do.

When I was a young man, a kind but earnest protestant friend
asked me, “Are you saved?” He knew I went to Church but he did not think that
Catholics or Anglicans came up to his standard of proper Christians. What he
meant by “Are you saved?” was saved ”from” sin, saved “from” damnation, saved “from”
myself. But this is not exactly how Our Lord and his apostle tend to use the
idea of salvation. They mostly mean it as saving positively “for” something –
for the Kingdom of God’s power to come as an experienced reality, saving for
future hope, saving not for imminent judgment but for present blessings of confidence
in what He promises, saved for being instruments of forgiveness and the good in
the world. We know the worst of us, and we know the best too. So we know that this
is all within reach.

Yet, looking at the world around us, it is easy to think
that this could be Christian wishful thinking. We may talk still about the good
of Christ saving us, but even those with a sense of spiritual desire dismiss
the idea of needing to be saved as strange or presumptuous. It strikes me that
nothing is either new in this. It is not news that people still waste their
gifts and futures, people still hoard up the wrong treasures, only a few have
the right priorities and values in life, only a few see where and how the hand
of God is at work, only a few are actively involved in working their lives like
that field that will one day flourish, and produce not just any old crop but
the fruits of the Holy Spirit when the buried pearl is at last found.

It should not surprise us. God tends not to work on the grand
public scale of dramatic shows of overpowering strength. He always works from
within, and from the little scraps of what is left over from what we have. From
within is how he came into the world through a single individual, Mary. He
rescued the mere remnant that was left of His once faithful people Israel.
Through brave, honest souls he brings healing and peace, transformation and
hope. To this day, His miracles come from wIthin nature and not like magic against
it. So, when the Church can seem to be a declining minority, all that is left
of a spiritual life in Christ that was once second nature to everyone, it is
easy to think that religion is a private viewpoint, a matter for the individual
or a small group making a path through life, rather than the true account of
the sheer basic fact of how the entire universe has been built and operates by
Christ. It is easy to think we are a sideshow, mourning our loss of influence
or relevance. It is easy to wonder if we have a future at all. Why would anyone
wish to talk about Christ saving us?

But it is not like that. For the irony is that, when Jesus
spoke of setting your heart on treasures stored up for heaven, He meant His own
heart, Whose treasures are we human beings He is saving up to adorn His heaven.
We are just like the sweepings of the wheat from the floor that no one in their
right mind would buy, let alone invest in; and yet God has been prepared to pay
for us the highest cost. We are pearls of great price, for whom Our Lord has paid
up everything in His hands to buy the field we are in. We are part of his
tireless labour of sheer determination to work the land, so that what it brings
forth is seen to be full of goodness, of trust in what He has promised, His creative
power to bring justice and delight, to keep on passing through adversity and
emerge with inexhaustible forgiveness and the light of life.

To bring all this about there is no tipping of the scales, no
short cut. It is not so much about our lonely perseverance, as about Christ’s painstaking
labour in the field he has bought, working on us from the inside out until we
produce the costly value buried within, to make His Kingdom come on earth as it
is in heaven. That it may be happening in you and me, is because the whole
earth is the Lord’s, being worked on constantly, inch by inch, soul by soul,
heart by heart.

Every year in Holy Week, we recall the words from the Lamentations
of Jeremiah (1.12), “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by? Behold and see
if there is any trouble like my trouble?” No, this trouble is not nothing – deep
down, it is the happening of everything at the hands of Christ Who fills the
universe and makes it to exist only for love.

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Welcome to Mark Woodruff's homepage - for his writings and thinking on Social Development and Civil Society, Christian Unity, Church history and theology, various essays and addresses, and some of his music from over the years.

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